Holiday (8 page)

‘Hard on a woman, y’know,’ he said. ‘This is the only relief she gets. A fortnight off once a year.’

Fisher sat impressed; the man observed, slaved for his wife, lived for his kids. Now, at this table, he apologised because he came home from work late, had to travel away, couldn’t romp daily with the children. Fisher drew him out; he’d made built-in cupboards, done the brick-laying for the garage, added a conservatory, all inside four years, and yet felt guilty. Was he lying? Did he drudge at his property to dodge or exclude his wife so that now she complained of him. Here was no compulsive gambler, this honest man.

The wife returned, blonde hair brushed again.

Fisher, back straight in his chair, asked them out for a drink. They ought not to leave the children who might wake. Fisher, superior, did not press, allowed them to decide on the pub at the street-corner once they were certain the youngsters were away.

While they waited this certainty, Fisher was summoned to the phone to speak to his father-in-law. Vernon invited him over. He refused at once, but gave his reason. Even as he explained, the whole thing sounded bogus and he imagined the exaggerated expression on his listener’s face.

‘Is there anything particular why you want me over?’ he asked.

‘Friendliness.’

‘I see.’

‘Oh, ye of little faith.’ Vernon parroted a Welsh pulpit. ‘No, we’ve not given you up. You’re here. We know you; we’d like your company.’

‘Thanks. I’m sorry, but I’ve promised.’

‘That’s all right Edwin. We thought you might be on your own.’

David Vernon threatened in this oblique manner. When one crossed him, he hung his head, murmured something polite and marked the incident indelibly down to be paid for at his leisure. He’d no time for sentimentalities.

In the pub the young wife, Sandra, chose cherry brandy while her husband and Fisher drank half-pints.

‘We never go into a pub at home,’ she said. ‘Do we, Terry?’

‘We don’t often go out together.’

‘I like this,’ she said, flourishing the drink. ‘I feel excited.’ She did not sound so. Fisher disliked her common-place features, her redness of skin, the gentility of voice, of gesture. ‘There’s something about this.’ It was, in fact, hot, noisy and crowded. ‘Don’t you think some pubs have atmosphere?’

‘I suppose so.’ Fisher.

‘The landlord’s a character. Or the clientele. We ought to go out more, Terry. Your mother would sit-in. But he’s too tired. Do you like classical music, Mr Fisher?’ They’d exchanged names.

Fisher now reeled off favourite orchestras, pianists, described his record collection, while Sandra, Mrs Smith, gushed and simpered as if she were tight already. Her husband manifested no offence, but smiled as if this animated silliness of his wife were commendable. She confessed she’d sung in the Harmonic Choral Society before she’d had the boys and was now considering rejoining them, claiming her voice had deepened, enriched itself. A contralto. He’d never have guessed that from her speaking voice. No, she’d not enjoyed Belshazzar’s Feast, nor the War Requiem, but A Child of our Time wasn’t too bad and the Berlioz Te Deum staggering. Fisher grinned; his highbrow colleagues might take exactly the same line without loss of face.

They drank again.

After her third cherry brandy, when he had told her that he lectured at the University on the philosophy of education, she screeched admiration, clutching his arm.

‘I know you’ll think me a fool,’ another cackle, both hands on the crook of his elbow, ‘but I’ve not the remotest idea what that is.’

The piano struck up. Middle-aged faces brightened.

He tried to tell her, but diffidently. David Vernon, that bright day’s adder, had poisoned him too often there.

‘I can just see, Edwin, what the philosophy of education is. Only just.’

‘Isn’t there a formulation of principles behind law?’ His father-in-law encouraged such circumlocutions.

‘I’m sure of it. There must be books on it. Mind you, I’ve not read them.’

‘Didn’t they lecture on it at university?’

‘I went only,’ the sly voice whined, ‘to a Welsh university, not to Oxford. And though they occupied us with branches of learning I now consider useless, I don’t recollect any specific course on the philosophy of the subject. One or two, as I recall, tried perhaps to take us beyond the detailed instance, but I’d hardly have seen it as philosophy. History, perhaps, archaeology, sociology, economics, guesswork. Yes.’

‘The concept of justice,’ Fisher had snapped.

‘The concept, yes. The concept.’ Vernon smiled. ‘I don’t understand that. I steal your purse. At one time I am hanged for it; at another my hand is cut off; elsewhere you forgive me; nowadays I’m examined by a psychiatrist and put on probation. These are the forms of justice, are they? I don’t know.’

‘But as soon as you tackle that question you embark,’ his jargon deteriorated, ‘on philosophy. That’s what it is; an enquiry to see what these actions have in common.’

‘A desire to stop theft.’

‘I don’t know,’ Fisher said. ‘The religious men who . . .’ Vernon waved delicate hands at him.

‘If it is not, I’ve no further interest. If to wish to protect private property is philosophy then I philosophise.’

‘It’s the formulation in words that is philosophy.’

‘Yes. I fear so.’ Vernon gesticulated with a cigar. ‘And a useless activity it is.’

‘Oh, I’d agree if that were the only form of action. But for every single philosopher there are a hundred lawyers and a thousand teachers.’

‘Who pay no attention to the one.’

‘That doesn’t matter. A purely utilitarian approach.’

And so they’d argue, Vernon murmuring, ‘purely, purely,’ and tracing, spoiling the cigar smoke with an ironical finger.

‘How many philosophers of education, Edwin,’ he’d ask, ‘at present at work in this country have made any impact on the day schools? Or at long second hand on me, the interested general reader, so that I shall recall their names when you mention them?’

Fisher tried to argue pragmatically, to convince the other that it did prospective teachers good to struggle temporarily with these ideas, however dry or useless, or better, that his own approach, a close examination of the language in which these principles were couched was a preparation for life where words figured so largely. But Vernon had none of it. He voiced a low opinion of schoolmasters who were only that because they were incapable of anything else, lacking any special expertise, who preferred the privileged position in a school, dominating the young rather than competing with men in an adult world.

‘It’s obvious you’ve never been in front of a class.’

‘It’s obvious,’ Vernon answered, ‘Edwin, from your frowning and red face and threatening voice that you’ve barely been anywhere else.’

In fact Fisher rarely lost his temper in argument. He knew that Vernon’s philosophy was materialistic; solicitors made money because they harboured no egalitarian heresies about themselves and because they worked as well as protected themselves.

‘Go and ask your students,’ Vernon pressed. ‘I do. They’ll condemn you out of their own mouths. Your course is a pleasant year’s rest after finals. The Law Society’s no such holiday home. Our exams may be boring rote-work so that one needs no brains to pass, but candidates fail in droves.’

‘Because they get no proper tuition.’

‘Perhaps, perhaps. But mainly because we have a philosophy of law. At least for these candidates. And it is that the lay-about and the half-prepared and the gas-bag will be found wanting and marked down. Unless an aspirant solicitor can write and figure, can give and take account of the laws of the land, he will not pass. Your students, and it was so even in my day at my nonconformist, puritan college, will be given a diploma whatever they know or don’t know. And you cannot deny it.’

The voice splayed Welsh.

Fisher even as he returned to the argument suspected that his father-in-law envied him his niche. ‘A doctor’s cap presses my brow, and I walked gown’d.’

Even as he grappled with his father-in-law, Fisher wryly considered life which had presented him first with his own dad, an ignorant shopkeeper, and now this proxy, a graduate member of a learned profession, who both had envied him his status, his scholarship and poked round in reference books or flashy argument to prove themselves somewhere near equality with a son who’d make little claim himself to learning.

He explained, then, to Sandra Smith what he did, and she cooed softly as her husband smiled vaguely. They were acquiring experience which they’d retail to neighbours. ‘Do you remember that university lecturer, Terry, in our digs? Talked about philosphy. Explained beautifully, didn’t he?’ ‘Couldn’t make a word out, myself.’ ‘Ooh, Terry.’ And the neighbours’ eyes would brighten at this high life as they countered with the man who offered them a ride in his Daimler.

Now the piano hammered ‘Roses of Picardy’ which the pierrots sang so that Fisher, head dizzy, hummed as voices joined in. He felt ashamed to do so, and when they left not long afterwards with Sandra between them, arm-in-arm with both, he embarrassed himself by breaking out again almost fervently into the song, as if it mattered.

‘Are you a singer?’ Sandra asked, hugging his arm tight.

‘No.’

‘What song is it?’

‘The one they were playing in the pub.’

‘I’d never heard it. Had you, Terry?’ He had not.

She wished, swaying, that she knew more about music, that she’d stuck at her piano lessons. Back in the house, he checked with them that the children were fast asleep, then considered inviting the husband out for more alcohol. But he had the sense to keep his mouth shut. He’d done them good, and they’d now sit downstairs smilingly trifling with the magazines or telly, and nipping, Terry at least, frequently into the lavatory. That sufficed.

He did not join them downstairs, but lay flat on his bed celebrating the shining roses of the song. Three pints. With those and a gin or two, he and Meg had lifted themselves into equanimity, into content, so that once she had sat down at the piano her grandfather had left her and played, wildly, a Brahms Waltz. It sounded rich through the house, with a brazen clatter, on this huge dark instrument which had stretched along one wall from a door to a door in the living-room in Wales, on that small-holding. He knew she could play, had heard her, or had he? But now, swaying slightly in their London box, he’d been overwhelmed by the great chords and the hesitating lilt of the piece, and thus desperate with love for the player and her mystery, he’d slipped his hands up her skirt as she giggled on the piano stool. ‘Could I be drunk for ever, on liquor, love and fights?’ Her hair grew so thickly, so magnificently auburn that she seemed inhuman, a golden goddess, as she loved him, sprawled on the floor where he could make out the worn, dim gold of the pedals of her piano.

Now he was alone.

He remembered that semi-detached in south London to which they’d moved when he’d taken his second job, head of department in a comprehensive school. London he disliked, especially the travelling and here again Meg acted oddly. She had a job, as distant as his own, but claimed, with all her father’s perversity, that the time wasted on trains was well spent, kept her out of mischief, in form. Sometimes she visited two colleagues who lived in a flat near the school and what with his societies they never took their evening meal before nine. He looked back to this as a period of continual tiredness when they lay in bed till midday both Saturday and Sunday. In the holidays they travelled, to Athens, Tunis, often to France, once to the United States, returning burnt brown, weary with talk of local wines or prices to shoot at Meg’s parents on the one-day visit allotted to them. That became a game. ‘Impress your father.’

Vernon took his expected stance, that everything worth knowing about the world could be found in Cefn where he had grown up. All varieties of humanity were there.

‘But beauty, daddy. Pictures, architecture, even weather.’

‘If we wanted the exotic, we had the cinema.’

‘Do you really think that seeing a film is the same as visiting a place?’

‘I do not. Often it is better, because it is done with a more selective eye than one’s own.’

‘You speak for yourself,’ Meg shouted.

‘I do, my dear. And I exempt you from ordinary mortality’s limitations. But I could have the Parthenon or the Alhambra Palace in sunshine, the Taj Mahal by moonlight, and then compare them almost at once with our little Bethels or the public library in rain.’

‘Who in his right mind would want to do anything so daft?’

‘I would, dearest.’

‘You wouldn’t. You wouldn’t. You go abroad yourself.’

‘Of course. That’s why I can make the claim. From experience.’

‘He’s pulling your leg, Margaret,’ her mother interrupted. ‘Don’t encourage him.’

‘I’m serious.’ Vernon’s head nodded aristocratically.

And on the way home, Meg would turn on her husband demanding why he didn’t defend her. She drove; whirling through the traffic as if she had mounted knives on her wheels to hack her father’s inane casuistries to shreds.

‘He like his little argument,’ Fisher answered diplomatically.

‘He wants to dominate me. And you. Especially you. And he does it when you sit there dumb as a baby without answering a word. Why don’t you take him on?’

‘I don’t want to. I enjoy his whimsies.’

‘At my expense.’

Then she’d be near tears, clashing the car into gear, braking with violence, stalling the engine. He could not help thinking that he fought both wife and her father together.

Now he walked out again where it was cool, still light, with the sky pearly. In the gardens of their bungalows elderly couples stood, exchanging views with the neighbours. Young men revved up motor bikes and even the middle-aged walked hand in hand. At one raw house, Mon Bijou, he stopped to hear a piano thrilling at chords. The March from Tannhäuser. ‘Hail, bright abode where song the heart rejoices.’ When he’d first learnt that, at fifteen, he’d been sick with love for a parson’s daughter. A serious matter, though he had mentioned his infatuation to nobody. Now as he heard the steady rhythm’s solemnity, the turn, he knew that longing, or. Or. It could not be so. For a moment he was translated, but it was all over inside seconds. He listened as an adult who condemned both Wagner’s banality and the tinny rattle of the piano. With relief, from himself, he pushed up the road.